I was amused to see that the technological gee-whiz aircraft currently being brought into service by airlines around the world have one serious disadvantage compared to older aircraft. Flight Global reports:
A notable dynamic of the current aircraft maintenance and reliability issues being experienced by carriers around the world is that the problems have been more acute among the latest-generation technologies.
That impact is being felt in terms of the availability of parts to complete maintenance tasks – thereby increasing the length of aircraft groundings for MRO work and curtailing the revenue generated by those assets – the costs of securing the parts, which have risen amid the tight supply-demand balance, and the lack of maturity in some technologies, meaning more time in the shop to fix teething issues and fine-tune performance.
That has created the curious situation where airlines that operate older types of aircraft and engines have started to highlight genuine financial and operational benefits from doing so – an advantage doubtless helped by falling fuel prices in recent months, which have dampened some of the economic benefits of owning the latest-generation types.
There's more at the link.
That's a situation I've seen in a number of high-tech industries. In computers, for example, the introduction of a new generation of operating system can bring with it glitches, bugs and errors that can completely shut down operational computer systems until the problems are solved. If your company happens to rely on those systems as the backbone of its operations . . . tough. I daresay many of my readers have horror stories about that sort of thing.
In the case of airlines, it can lead (literally) to their demise, as evidenced by the Go First bankruptcy in India:
Go First says its woes are not due to financial mismanagement but rather, because of engine issues ... It has blamed US engine maker Pratt & Whitney for having had to ground many of its planes "due to the ever-increasing number of failing engines" supplied by it - this, the airline says, caused a severe cash flow problem.
Go First says it was forced to ground 25 aircraft - about half of its fleet of Airbus A320neo planes - leading to about 108bn rupees ($1.3bn; £1bn) in lost revenue and expenses.
Again, more at the link.
I see the same problem in nearby vehicle maintenance and service shops. The owners and mechanics - whom I meet in local diners, and listen to their stories - tell me that older vehicles, without all the gee-whiz technology of new ones, are far easier (and cheaper) to keep on the road, because they don't rely on timely shipments of parts that are in short supply. If a sensor goes down, it can shut down an entire engine because the master computer can't read it. On an older vehicle, there's no master computer to worry about, so the vehicle keeps right on going. Mechanics have a lot to say in favor of that.
Just because technology is new and improved doesn't mean we have to adopt it at once. I'd much rather wait for the bugs to be sorted out, and the product prove itself to be reliable and safe, before I trust anything critical to it. Salesmen hate people like me, of course, but I don't lose any sleep over that.
Peter
(EDITED TO ADD: And guess what today's headline was? Spirit to ground 7 planes over engine issue: Some of RTX's Pratt & Whitney Geared Turbofan engines require inspection)
14 comments:
My oldest son is a GM Master Mechanic and he is swamped with work. His base salary is about $120k per year but he is working many hours above that so he is burning out. All the dealerships in the area are hurting for qualified Mechanics as the work is never ending.
He went to Trade School to learn auto repair and told me he never believed he would work so much, earn so much, and be in demand so much. He is their top producer so they give him the hardest cases. I told him that is the issue of being good at what you do as I was.
Un huh.
I was a computer programmer for 36 years until I retired in January 2022. My personal computer was always one generation back from the current leading edge because it HAD to work. I kept them until it was no longer compatible with the software I needed to use. When the phone rings at 2 am, that's a bad time to discover a glitch in your operating system.
Mark D
The inevitable outcome of the "competency crisis".
My cousin's company still runs some things with ZipDisks. I haven't seen them since the early 2000's when flash drives became a thing but they still work apparently.
My van had a problem with the driver's power window. It would go down, but not come back up. Also it blew the fuse for the radio and half the dash.
Tracking down the problem reached $1732 for parts alone, and still no solution. Walked across the street and traded it in towards a new one. (And it then blew a hose half way to the other dealership ... but no longer my problem.)
My dad knew the manager of a Sears (remember Sears ?), who said the ideal product is one step below top-of-the-line.
The reasoning was that the next step down had been thoroughly wrung out, and had been found to work.
- Charlie
There's also the fun trend toward using unique parts everywhere, instead of generic off-the-shelf parts. Apparently some perfectly ordinary vehicles (not race cars) use special spark plugs...? And some new lawn mowers (from the green brand, IIRC) use special, new, very expensive oil filters instead of normal ones.
A neighbor has a problem: his nearly-new truck lost its coolant on a trip. Seems the return hose from the heater core rubbed against the oil filter and failed. It's not just a piece of coolant hose cut off a roll, oh no. It's a factory-formed part, and it's on back order; there's a shop in California that has one, but they're not parting with it. (The truck manufacturer is apparently taking good care of him until a new hose can be manufactured, but still: using an unnecessarily unique part, and not having spares, is all too typical these days. And what's with the hose rubbing against the oil filter?)
I remember my grandfather telling us to never buy the first year of a new model of car. Same reasons all over again.
I never wanted to be a beta tester, and the few times I had to only reinforced that opinion. I tried to tell the managers at our small town hospital that you don't need to do a ton of market research in new instruments. You just go to the big city, visit a few of their labs and ask them what they like and what works for them.
Just in time manufacturing and tight supply chains also lead to a lack of spare parts. It's not like it used to be where they'd do an enormous run and they'd have oil-paper wrapped spares turning up in the back of a warehouse 50 years later.
Old Fart Memory.
1970's small and medium businesses were going to computers and dropping traditional bookkeeping. My CEO at the time was a former Boeing engineer with a MBA. He insisted we operate parallel systems for at least six months. In the end, we went eleven months before all the glitches were worked out of the computer system.
The big problems with both the P&W Geared TurboFan, and the CFM Leap engines is that they needed to be more efficient than the prior generation. Some of it is because the airlines wanted to save money on fuel costs -- but a lot of it is also driven by government requirements for increased efficiency/better carbon footprint (especially in Europe, which has very strong requirements for that).
And you can gain efficiency if you can run hotter. But that's produced interesting reliability issues (the engines are good for less time on wing between maintenance cycles). And some of it is from unexpected things -- the GTF has dust particles melting in the heat, and clogging the cooling holes, for example.
I work on construction equipment such as excavators and skid steer loaders. The older, pre-emissions equipment used mostly small diesel engines with mechanical fuel injection and glow plugs for cold starting assistance.
EPA Tier IV emissions standards for these machines became effective in 2008. That meant diesels running common rail high pressure electronic fuel injection, exhaust treatment systems, DEF, etc. plus all the computer controls and nannies that go with that.
I find that my customers are preferring to keep their older pre-emissions machines running even when it might not be economically wise to do so. 20 years ago I would never see a customer authorizing $20k in repairs to a machine worth less than $40k; however I am commonly seeing bills of $10-$12k on a machine that's worth $20k or less.
Big corporate outfits are doing the usual trade-in and upgrade routine still, as machines become available- and that's often a problem as new allocations are still down. But the traded-in pre-emissions machines are bringing a premium on the used market far above what you might expect. A medium sized wheeled skid loader, pre-emissions, with 5-6000 hours on it, will bring reliably $15k-$25k on the used market if it's in good mechanical condition. It often gets sold to a small contractor and gets cleaned up and worked some more. By way of comparison, a machine in that condition 20 years ago you'd be lucky to get $3-$5k at auction for, and the machine usually went to die on a farm.
To expand on my previous comment, I am *still* having a hard time getting parts, even simple parts.
This problem started with "Global supply chain disruption caused by the pandemic" and has morphed into "Global economic issues and continuing logistics problems from the COVID pandemic" and today I think the excuse is "**** you, nobody wants to work, you'll get your parts whenever we feel like it"
I'm having problems finding parts for older machines, "older" meaning 20 year old equipment NOT antiques. Oil seals, specialty fittings and valves, engine and hydraulic parts, filters, even automatic transmission fluid, all have been on short supply. Common brake calipers could not be found at the local shops, they all said the vendors have a lack of core parts to rebuild.
Now that parts are beginning to be available again, prices have doubled. Synthetic ATF is over $250 a bucket now, that was $99 a bucket a couple years ago. The most common air filter I use I buy in case lots, they went up from $85 a case shipped to $135 a case shipped. I had to pay $117 for a serpentine belt, at my cost, from a vendor, and nobody else had any left but this vendor. The last one I bought was $39 and that was 3 years ago.
I've started looking for new old stock parts from MRO resellers on eBay to find stock for my business. That helps.
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